Is dracut replacing mkinitcpio?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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Is Arch switching from mkinitcpio to dracut? And if so, how long will mkinitcpio likely be supported?

I’m asking as the Arch linux installation manual says to install mkinitcpio, so I did. I then made a hook that gives the user options to to boot into tmpfs, overlay, or a snapshot. I’m quite happy with it.

Then I came upon a few posts that say Arch is switching to dracut. That would be a shame for those that like injecting scripts/hooks into the boot process. Dracut seems to be exceedingly complex to figure out. And I’ve yet to see any clear documentation showing how to do create a boot script in it. The exception being cryptic man-like pages with no examples.

Does Arch have plans to switch?

Please tell me it’s not switching.

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Not that I am aware of.

There was a plan for Arch to switch to dracut but nobody ever picked up the work so they stuck with mkinitcpio. Unless something has changed recently, I don’t think there are plans to switch.

That being said, it might make more sense to ask them directly instead of creating an account to ask here. :thinking:

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Thanks. This is good to hear. :slightly_smiling_face:

And I created an account here to share ideas with other Arch users.

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I switched my Arch installation from mkinitcpio to dracut, have found it does more automatically for you and less you have to manually configure.

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5

That seems true if you just want to use the default settings or change something simple like kernel compression. It’s great for that. However, the nightmare begins when you want to make scripts that interact with the ramdisk environment.

I’ve seen several posts of people who just can’t figure dracut scripting out but who are just fine with mkinitcpio. And dracut is not just a little more complex. It’s on an entirely new level of complexity. It’s pretty much a rabbit hole with little to no documentation for tutorials or scripting.

Anyways, as long as mkinitcpio is still around, I’m happy.

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mkinitcpio seems to be undergoing pretty active development so I guess it will be still around for yet quite some time.

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You created an account here (not Arch) to share ideas with Arch users ( again, not Arch)?

I’m really confused. Why would you not go to Arch forums, and instead come here? This is Endeavour. I think you might be in the wrong place.

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You do realize we use dracut here, yes?

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not all :innocent:

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No, not everyone, but the newer isos use dracut.

I use dracut, but fit different reasons lol

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AFAIK arm no use dracut

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Got it. Well, other than our arm division, the normal installs use dracut for maybe a year now?? Approximately

Either way it’s still kind of odd to have come here and not Arch to find Arch users.

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if that what usr pick … AFAIK " choice" still thing on Endeavouros

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I haven’t looked that deep in avm but I thought the choice was only grub or systemd boot. I don’t think between dracut and mkinitcpio

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maybe you right …

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Endevour uses dracut, but don’t forget that to add to your kernel cmdline you need to add to /etc/kernel/cmdline instead of dracut

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17

It was actually to post about something else, but I don’t have forum permissions yet to make a post about it.

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Even if the default were to change, you can still choose which one you want to use. I prefer dracut so I just add it to my pacstrap and :magic_wand: just like that my Arch install uses dracut instead of mkinitcpio.

It doesn’t really matter what the default is; no reason to get excited.

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I installed Arch the other day with Kde and I’m sure it had dracut.

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How did you install it? It would be very odd if you didn’t specifically install it.